Saved From Holocaust: ‘He Loved Me and He Wanted to Keep Me’

editor Thursday 16 February 2017

By Korey Kilgannon.. On Valentine’s Day, couples often reminisce about that moment they knew they would stay together, whether during a vacation, over a fancy dinner or, perhaps, while meeting their future in-laws. For Isaac and Rosa Blum, who became teenage sweethearts 75 years ago in a ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland, that moment came as they and thousands of other terrified Jews were being herded to a death camp by Nazi soldiers. “I saw her walking in front of me,” Mr. Blum recalled. “I went up to the German and told him, ‘That’s my sister,’ even though she was my girlfriend.”

Miraculously, they were both pulled off the line and managed to survive the Holocaust by working as slave laborers in a munitions factory. The following 70 years have been a cinch by comparison, the couple said on Monday in their two-story house in the Manhattan Beach neighborhood of Brooklyn. He is 94, and she is a year younger. Asked to recount their lengthy love affair, they noted the absurdity of couching it — a romance incubated in the hell of the Holocaust — in the frilly trappings of Valentine’s Day. Read the full story.

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